Thank you for joining us today for the Telecom Plus Interim Results Presentation for the half-year ending 30 September 2025. I'm Stuart Burnett, CEO, and I'm joined today by Nick Schoenfeld, CFO. We are very pleased to report another period of very strong performance across the board, putting us firmly on track for another year of record customer and service numbers, as well as record profits and returns to shareholders. Now, before we get into the detail, here's a quick overview of the running order this morning. I'm going to kick off with a run-through of our highlights of H1FY26. Nick will then take you through our continued strong financial performance, and I'll then finish with our exciting outlook for the years ahead. As we go through the update today, I think there are three key takeaways, which you can see on the slide.
First of all, we've now delivered compounding double-digit customer growth for four consecutive years, underpinned by our unique multi-service subscription-style business model, which delivers us with that structural cost advantage together with our partner route to market. Together, these enable us to sustainably outcompete as we stride on towards our medium-term target of over 2 million customers, with expectations of growing between 10% and 15% a year as we go. Second, we reiterate our previous guidance for the full year of FY2026, of total customer numbers increasing by around 25%, with underlying organic customer growth in the low double digits. Of course, in H1, we saw underlying annualized organic customer growth of around 11%. For the full year adjusted profit before tax, we expect between GBP 132 million-GBP 138 million.
Third, we've entered into this sort of exciting cross-sell trial partnership with TalkTalk acquiring two tranches of broadband and landline customers with the aim to cross-sell them with additional services through our multi-service platform and utilizing our partners as a unique cross-sell channel. The initial trials have exceeded our expectations, with around 5,000 customers upgraded and cross-sold so far. We now really view this as, I guess, as a sort of like a proven blueprint now for acquiring further books of single-service customers from across our service lines of energy, broadband, mobile, and insurance, into which we can create value by cross-selling our multi-service offering. Without any further ado, here are the business highlights for the last financial year, with the headlines summarized on this slide. As you can see, as I've just said, we've had another very strong half-year in H1FY2026.
We saw a 19% total increase in customers, with an underlying organic growth rate of around 11%, and with services increasing by over 256,000. Now, as expected, and as we shared back in October, due to a change in our H1, H2 profit phasing going forwards, which Nick will touch on later, gross profit and adjusted PBT were both down on the last half-year. To be clear, this does not impact our total expected full-year profits. Finally, we've increased the interim dividend to GBP 0.38, and we'll continue with our policy of distributing 80%-90% of adjusted profit after tax across the full year. Just like we've said, for each of the last four years, and with yet another period of delivering double-digit % growth behind us, we continue to have significant confidence about the future.
To understand, I guess, exactly how the business has continued to deliver this performance and why it's such a positive indicator of what's to come, it's important to understand some of the key competitive dynamics in play during the period. First of all, over the last year or so, and I think we talked about this over the summer, competition has firmly returned to the energy market, and all major energy suppliers are actively seeking new customers. I think all of you will have seen in various guises some of the sort of extensive advertising, for example, that various energy suppliers are all doing. Despite this, given that we're now in this sort of post-energy crisis, stable and resilient marketplace, pricing strategies have remained rational, as they should be in a regulated, commoditized, essential services marketplace.
Thus, having shown that the business can grow rapidly when energy prices rose significantly in fiscal year 2022 and 2023, and that we can grow rapidly when energy prices fell significantly in fiscal year 2024, during fiscal year 2025 and for the first half of fiscal year 2026, we've now demonstrated that the business can continue to grow even when energy prices are more stable. By that, I mean price caps are now moving by sort of tens of GBP a quarter rather than the sort of the hundreds or the thousands of GBP that we saw during the energy crisis. On the bar charts that you can see on the left-hand side, you can see how, off the back of all of that, we've now delivered an impressive four-year compound annual growth rate from the first half of fiscal year 2022 through the first half of fiscal year 2026 of over 20% for total customers, over 16% for organic customers, and around 21% for adjusted profit before tax.
In summary, we're essentially back to, clearly back to exactly the sort of marketplace that our business was designed for, that our business model was designed for, enabling us to outcompete and grow rapidly and profitably. As a reminder, I think you'll have seen this slide before. This is our very simple but incredibly powerful business model. I'll jump straight through now to showcasing some of what we've been doing across each of the three core components, starting with our unique multi-service proposition. Now, I'll actually jump quite quickly through this slide as well, because the key message here is very simple. Just like we've always done, we continue to invest in our market-leading multi-service proposition. Right now, some highlights. We're incredibly proud to be a rich recommended provider for both energy and broadband.
We're, in fact, the only business ever to hold both of these accolades at the same time. At the same time, we're seeing our unique cashback card going from strength to strength, and we've got all of our insurance products back on sale and really focused on getting ready to scale this exciting service line. At the same time, we're offering the most competitive mobile deal in the market. Now, as an aside, one consequence of offering such a competitive mobile deal is that we've seen increased numbers of mobile-only customers during the period, which, when you combine that with the acquisition of the single-service broadband customers from TalkTalk those two, I think, are the biggest drivers of service growth percentage lagging behind our customer growth rate.
Otherwise, we build out and continue to invest in our cross-sell capabilities, and as insurance picks up now that, as I said, all the insurance services are back up and running, we expect that service growth rate will start to catch up. Our multi-service platform and proposition is in great shape. The great thing about our multi-service customers is that they are at the heart of delivering our unique structural cost advantage. Now, to underpin that structural cost advantage, we've been increasingly focused on driving efficiency across the business, especially given the way that our admin costs increased between FY2021, 2022, and FY2024. We're pleased to make further progress in improving our operational efficiency. This is all at the same time as boosting our overall customer experience. I just mentioned that we're rich recommended for both energy and broadband.
That is a serious independent endorsement of the quality of the experience that we are providing whilst delivering and driving further efficiency into the business. Key to our progress on efficiency is our investment in AI and digitization. In particular, we are pushing forward with our 24/7 AI-powered WhatsApp knowledge assistants, which have been launched for both customers and partners. At the same time, we are also driving efficiency through accelerating some offshoring of sort of simple, repeatable tasks. Coming into the financial year, we had about 10% of our operational FTE offshore. By the end of this financial year, we will have around 30% of our operational FTE offshore. As I said, they will be undertaking sort of simple, repeatable tasks that do not need to be undertaken in a more highly skilled environment onshore.
These are exactly the type of tasks that are going to be the first to be replaced by AI. That means that the playbook here is that, obviously, as these simple, repeatable tasks are replaced by AI, we're able to gradually and efficiently wind down our outsourced offshore capabilities rather than facing a more sort of costly and complex onshore employee restructuring as we go through that journey. Now, looking forward over the coming months, we're looking at how we can use AI to help drive revenue growth. A key area of focus is using AI to help identify how and when to best identify how to cross-sell additional services to either customers that we've acquired from people like TalkTalk or indeed into our existing book of customers where there's opportunities to boost services per customer.
Another good example of an AI-based efficiency initiative we have underway is an AI triage tool for smart meter faults, where we can get customers to submit images or photos of their smart meter screen when they think their smart meter is not working. Rather than having to have lots of sort of human eyeballs trying to understand what's going on with the screen, whether there's a fault, if there is, what's wrong with it, and what's needed to fix it, we've got an AI screening tool that can identify all of that in an automated way. Long story short, lots going on in this space and much more to come as we look forwards, in particular as we continue to investigate how we can use AI to help support our partners to be even more effective.
Mentioned this over the summer, and it is still early days, but we do increasingly see, as we sort of bring all of this work together, see this emerging line of sight to be able to reduce our FTE per customer by perhaps as much as 30%-50% over time as we scale. A really significant opportunity as we go. With all of that, hopefully, you can see how our one-of-a-kind multi-service value and service proposition creates a product that is really worthy of recommendation. That's exactly how we sign up our customers. Now, increasingly, we see ourselves as having three growth drivers, three channels, all which have sort of partners at the core. We see these three channels working together as enabling us to accelerate our journey to 2 million customers and beyond.
Now, we'll dig into each of these in a moment, but by way of summary, first, of course, is our long-standing, proven core, highly successful partner channel. Second is our new sort of inorganic acquisition and cross-sell channel, with the earlier results from our TalkTalk trial exceeding expectations. As seeing this channel is now sort of this blueprint has been proven out. Finally, we have brand partnerships, which is a more recent development. We talked over the summer about our sort of locals connector initiative, but also we see the opportunity to add maybe some larger sort of national brands over time as well. Taking each of these in turn, starting, of course, with our partner model, which for a long time we've been saying it's increasingly of its time. I think that that remains sort of truer right now than ever.
are two significant tailwinds we have talked about for some time, which have been driving continued strong interest in our partner model and that we expect to continue driving that interest over the year ahead. The first, of course, is the work transition. There are over 20 million people who are in the U.K. who are with sort of additional second, third, fourth part-time incomes. We call them multi-income individuals. These people are all operating a model of work, which our partner model squarely fits into what these people are looking for. We see that as something that is continuing to gain traction over time as people do not want the 9 to 5, they do not want to have to commute, they want to have flexibility. Second of all, the pensions crisis.
My personal view is that one of the biggest financial crises of not just the years, but the decades to come will be the pensions crisis, i.e., the fact that there are tens of millions of households who are not saving enough for retirement and are therefore facing some form of retirement poverty. Our model, which provides an upfront income plus a long-term revenue share, this sort of small cut of every bill that the customers you sign up, paid by the customers you sign up into perpetuity, fits squarely into the gap of providing a way for people to build up a long-term residual income and sort of solve that retirement poverty trap. Let's hear what comes out tomorrow, but there might be even more need for people to find alternative ways to boost their retirement earnings, given what might happen to pensions going forward.
Alongside our partners, we now have our inorganic and cross-sell channel. Towards the end of FY2025, we agreed this partnership arrangement with TalkTalk, who are our long-term broadband partner, under which we acquired 95,000 broadband landline customers with an initial 25,000 who migrated to us at the end of the last financial year, at the end of FY2025. We had sort of 60,000-65,000 or so migrating during H1 with a small balance to be migrated during H2. We then agreed to acquire a further tranche of around 120,000 broadband customers during H1. These customers became ours and are in our customer numbers during H1, but they will only actually migrate onto our systems during H2. In fact, they have not started migrating yet, so they are going to be in the final quarter of the financial year, so between January and March.
Now, not only are all of these broadband customers already serviced by the same underlying broadband technology as our broadband customers because they all access sort of Openreach to essentially the same gateways, but of course, by moving to UW, they'll start to benefit from that rich recommended broadband service that I mentioned earlier. Of course, the key reason for the trial has been to demonstrate how, through our unique multi-service offering plus our partner route to market, we're able to provide, I guess, even better value to and create significantly enhanced value from these customers through cross-selling energy, mobile, insurance, etc. Now, we are continuing to explore and trial a range of cross-sell opportunities, and we'll continue to do so with our partners at the center.
This includes matching these customers to partners who live near them, includes using upsell prompts whenever we interact with them via the app, the inbound calls, outbound marketing trials, and we're keeping sort of testing, learning, and improving as we go. Whilst we'll never stop learning from doing this, there's more to be proven out, but so far, this trial has exceeded our expectations as we've upgraded and cross-sold to over 5,000 customers as at the end of H1. Now, to try and put that number in some form of context, which hopefully is helpful.
Now, given the phased migration of these customers onto our platform that I mentioned, where we had 25,000 sort of coming into the new financial year, coming into H1, and then 60,000-65,000 migrated onto our systems gradually during H1, on average, we think we had sort of maybe between 50,000 and 60,000 customers actually on our systems available to be cross-sold during the half. Our cross-sold sort of success here was 5,000 out of an average of sort of maybe 50,000 or 60,000. Somewhere sort of high single digit, approaching 10% cross-sell penetration, which if you put that in context, a typical sort of rule of thumb in our industries of what you might expect to get from cross-sell campaigns is very low single digit, maybe 1% or 2% conversion from a campaign.
As a result, essentially having sort of proven out thus far that this model can work, we view this really as a blueprint for us being able to go out and acquire further books of single-service customers from across all of our service lines, whether broadband, mobile, insurance, or energy. Finding customers where they aren't receiving a differentiated service from their current provider and where there's a demonstrable opportunity for us to increase customer lifetime value through our model. I look out in the market and I can see across our service lines, millions of customers who fall into this category. As a result, we've got our sort of eyes up. We're exploring a handful of options across our different service lines.
Whilst it's, of course, early days, we're increasingly confident and excited about the opportunities that are presented now that we've built out this ability to acquire and then cross-sell additional services to them. Watch this space. Finally, brand partnerships. I mentioned over the summer that we've been experimenting over the past year or so through a number of small trials through linking up small local businesses, organizations, groups with our partners, whereby these local organizations can earn a new commission or income stream by introducing their customer or membership base to our partners, who will then be able to sign these customers up to our multi-service offer. These trials have been a real success. As a result, we've launched what we're calling connectors. Think of it as essentially a kind of new lead generation source for our partners.
The way to maybe try and bring it to life, if you think of an individual human individual partner in their local town, they might know perhaps, I don't know, 5% of the people in their local town. The local small businesses, organizations, groups, charities, whatever it might be in their local town, will collectively know pretty much everybody. Now, the way that the model works is that the partners will share 50% of their commission with the local business in exchange for a successful warm lead. This creates a win-win for the partner, which is a new source of leads.
It creates a win-win for the local business or organization, which generates a new income stream and a deeper relationship with their existing members or customers, and a win-win, of course, for those customers who get to benefit from the saving, simplicity, and service of the UW customer proposition. Now, we've already now signed up over 5,500 connectors, and that's up from around 1,000 over the summer. They range from one end, you've got people like estate agents and hairdressers, all the way through to local clubs, charities, and even like school groups and PTAs. We are very excited, of course, to see how this continues to develop.
As well as this, I guess, local small business angle, there's also an opportunity here that we can see to sort of partner with some larger, more recognizable national brands, perhaps a national brand or organization that might have a large customer base or a large membership base, a large loyal membership base that they can make a recommendation or a referral into, or maybe a brand that has very sort of strong brand recognition or strong trust associated with it, which are all sort of key facets of what we provide and which will really complement and amplify the work that our partners do. There you have it, the three key pillars of our unique business model, hopefully brought to life in a way that helps to explain why the business is performing so well and why we expect that to continue.
With that, I'm going to hand over to Nick to talk you through the numbers.
Thank you, Stuart. Let's start with the P&L. Now, as Stuart mentioned, adjusted PBT is at GBP 33 million relative to the prior year of GBP 46 million. That is due to the previously announced change in phasing of certain energy industry costs, such as metering costs, which are now spread more evenly across the financial year. Now, as mentioned, this follows from the evolution of our wholesale energy agreement, and this now more typically reflects the phasing patterns that one sees across the wider industry. This profit phasing evolution does not impact on cash flow or on our total expected full year profits. Gross profits is down 6%, and that reflects this H1, H2 rephasing split. Distribution expenses of GBP 22 million marginally decreased as a percentage of sales, and that reflects the service mix evolution.
Administrative expenses marginally increased to GBP 79 million against a backdrop of customer growth and higher national insurance and minimum living wage costs. The bad debt charge for the period as a % of sales was higher, and that reflects continued elevated levels of customer non-payment arising from previously high energy prices and the temporary moratorium on the involuntary installation of prepayment meters. We have a progressive ramp-up of this debt recovery process, which is underway. As a reminder, typically any movements in the bad debt levels across the industry are recovered through increases in the price cap, which accrue to the group. This all results in an overall adjusted PBT of GBP 33 million, with the main impact year on year being, of course, the H1, H2 cost rephasing.
If we now look at the balance sheet key movements, the increase in non-current assets is primarily driven by the two tranches of TalkTalk customer books, which were acquired, and net current assets are, of course, driven by working capital. I'll cover off both of these in more detail on the cash flow slide. Net debt was GBP 144 million, which is up GBP 28 million as a result of the acquisition of this second tranche of TalkTalk customers, and the net debt to EBITDA ratio remains at a conservative 1.1 times level. In terms of debt facilities, we have, as a reminder, an RCF bank debt facilities of GBP 205 million with a maturity to November 2028, and we've got private placement facilities of GBP 125 million maturing during the period 2030 to 2032, and that results in diversified total facilities of GBP 330 million.
If we now take a look at the cash flow, we'll see that the H1, H2 phasing evolution impacts the profit split starting point across the year, but it doesn't impact cash flow. You see it starts here with an H1 FY2026 EBITDA of GBP 46 million, which is lower than the previous year given this H1, H2 phasing of costs in the P&L going forward. Given that the cash flow is not impacted by the profit phasing, there's an offsetting working capital inflow of GBP 35 million, which more than balances this phasing out from a cash flow point of view. This working capital movement also reflects the shift of GBP 12 million of prepayments, which were made for the first tranche of TalkTalk customers in the previous financial year, and it's that shift from working capital to the CapEx line.
Now, that's because the ownership of those customers started to transfer across to us progressively during this last half year and become fixed assets. Now, as a reminder, the typical underlying working capital outflow expressed across a whole year, given our rate of growth, continues to be around the GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million outflow level. You've got then tax of GBP 17 million, and then there's CapEx of GBP 48 million. This reflects the GBP 12 million prepayments made in the last financial year in relation to that first tranche of TalkTalk customers acquired, which, as I mentioned, moved to the CapEx line now that they have transferred across. Therefore, there is a residual CapEx in the late 20s of millions of pounds, which is in relation to that second tranche of TalkTalk customers which were acquired.
On this second tranche, we obtained legal ownership of those customers straight away, although they will progressively migrate onto our billing systems during the second half. That leaves a residual spend on technology of around GBP 7.5 million as usual. With all this and the payment of dividends, as mentioned previously, you have net debt of GBP 144 million with that net debt to EBITDA position of 1.1 times despite the acquisition of the second tranche of TalkTalk customers. Now, on capital allocation, the backdrop continues to be our capital-light business model, given that this has got low underlying working capital requirements as we grow, and it has also low underlying CapEx limited to primarily technology development.
That is what determines our progressive distribution policy, where we maintain low leverage of around one times net debt to EBITDA, and at the same time, return between 80%-90% of adjusted net income to shareholders via dividends. The interim dividend will be GBP 0.38, which is up 3% on the prior year. Stuart.
Thanks, Nick. Look, we've talked through our continued strong operational and financial performance during H1 FY26. Now let's look forward to the years ahead and our journey to UW's next big milestone of 2 million customers and beyond. As a reminder, and as you can see here, we've got 3% market share in energy, and we're the seventh largest energy supplier in the U.K., the biggest independent challenger to the new Big Six. Of course, our market share across our other services is meaningfully low. We've got about 1% market share on broadband and mobile and a fraction of a percentage market share in insurance. The question certainly to my mind is not about the size or the scale of the opportunity, but it's about our journey to deliver on it.
As a reminder, you can see here our sort of 25-plus journey to this point. I think you're all aware of the dynamics in play between, first of all, 2008 and 2014, and then from 2014 to 2021. Now, having gone through the energy crisis, which cleared out those unsustainable operators, we're now four years into delivering double-digit net customer growth. In this, I guess, sort of normalized market with our market-leading customer proposition and these tailwinds around our partner opportunity, plus these additional sort of growth channels that I've talked about and being opened up, we've got a lot of confidence in our continued growth trajectory.
Now, as discussed before, as we go on that journey, we have a number of gross profit and admin cost levers to both support and increase our profit trajectory going forwards as we go on that journey to 2 million customers and beyond. I think it goes without saying that as a result of acquiring a number of inorganic single service customers already from TalkTalk, and given that we see that inorganic customer acquisition channel as a strong opportunity to create further value going forwards, this acquisition of single service customers has a natural and sort of temporary drag on the EBITDA per customer ratio just because of the mathematical effect of sudden increases of single service customer numbers before they then get gradually cross-sold to over time. Of course, we're most focused on the absolute power notes than the percentages.
It's important to understand these key components that we expect to come through over time. Starting off, maybe let's talk through the gross profit levers. First of all, as we continue to scale, we get increased buying power and the ability to have improved supply terms, whether that's because of growth ratchets in our wholesale supply deals or just sort of general increased buying power. We continue to look at ways to how we can sell additional higher margin services into our customer base and increase multi-service penetration through cross-sell and looking at how we can roll out, for example, additional insurance products. Insurance is still our sort of service line with the lowest penetration into the customer base, but also it's the service line with the biggest opportunity because you can have several different insurance lines that each individual customer can take.
We're actually exploring at the moment what our next insurance line to offer is alongside home and boiler cover. In addition, and we've talked about this, I think, before as well, our pricing strategy at the moment is very much pricing for growth rather than pricing for returns. You can see that on various different services. Obviously, we regularly sort of recalibrate our exact price position across our multi-service bundle to deal with the different competitive dynamics in play across our different marketplaces, but we're absolutely priced for growth rather than returns. That's something that over time there's an opportunity to, again, recalibrate that and extract more margin.
Of course, there are some offsetting factors, some downward movements in energy prices or, for example, the change that Ofgem introduced earlier in the year to reduce the operating cost allowance in the price cap as being sort of potentially offsetting type factors. Together, when we put all of these sort of gross profit levers together, we can see them being sort of worth like a net GBP 10-GBP 20 of additional EBITDA per customer over time on the gross profit side. On the admin cost side, we are now scaled for growth. Last year, we delivered some meaningful operating leveraging improvements, but as we talked about earlier in the slide with some of what we're doing on AI digitization and offshoring, there's real scope for more opportunity to come.
In the other direction, of course, there's things like the impact of government initiatives, things like the increased national insurance contributions and national living wage that we've already seen. Again, when you bring these admin cost factors together, we see the net impact of those as being worth in the region of GBP 10-GBP 20 again of additional EBITDA per customer over time as we scale. Bringing all of that together in summary, in FY2026, we expect to deliver total customer growth of around 25% with low double-digit organic growth, adjusted profit before tax in a range of GBP 132 million-GBP 138 million, and a full-year dividend increasing in line with our increased adjusted net profit. Over the medium term to the longer term, from FY2027 onwards, we expect to continue building market share across all of our services.
Remember that there's significant potential given that, again, 2 million customers equals just 6% market share in energy. We expect to build out our platform for subscription-style services, adding further services across insurance and financial services, as well as in the energy as a service space as that continues to evolve. We expect to open up new opportunities such as the TalkTalk cross-sell partnership, which will be a blueprint for further transactions and partnerships now that we've proven out the model. We see some powerful structural drivers of continued demand for our partner income opportunity. As all of this comes together, we expect to be delivering growing shareholder returns with the opportunity to increase our EBITDA per customer over time. Thank you very much, everybody. Let's move on to questions.
I think we've got a microphone that's going to be passed around, so please wait to receive the microphone before you ask your question. We've got quite a few people in the room today, so if I could please ask if people can try and, certainly first time around, restrict themselves to one or two questions. Once we've gone around everyone and we then have time, we'll come back and people might get a second bite of the cherry.
Hi. Sorry, Eric Smith from Berenberg. I'll just do one question to start. Just on the energy services numbers, we're broadly flat kind of in the period, and you mentioned the slightly higher churn rate. Just kind of when do you expect that churn rate to maybe normalize to original levels, and what do you see as kind of that expected normalized level? Is it the highest single digit that you previously mentioned?
Yeah, no, thanks. Yeah, currently our churn rate is running slightly higher than where we expect it to settle over time. We've been talking for some time now, I think, about expecting it to settle in the mid to high single digits, and that remains to be my expectation. I think that what we're seeing at the moment is during the energy crisis where people weren't able to switch, I think that created a degree of sort of pent-up demand. Now as the marketplace has sort of reopened up, some of that sort of pent-up demand is now sort of washing its way through the system. That's what I think that we've been seeing. I would have sort of half expected it to almost have got to the end of that wash through now, but it's clearly taking a little bit longer.
Absolutely, I still expect the churn rate to come down to that sort of mid- to high single digits over time, but it is taking a little bit longer. In terms of energy services overall, one interesting dynamic is in the market at the moment, there are only two energy suppliers that are going forwards in their service numbers of the largest medium and large suppliers, and that's Octopus and us. Every other medium and large supplier is going backwards in service numbers.
Sorry, just mentioned increased kind of pricing competition. Again, are you seeing that really coming fresh into the market? Is that also impacting churn alongside that kind of build-up you mentioned?
Everybody is competing actively, but I think the key thing is that they're competing rationally. That is the key. That is a feature of whether it's the need to have capital requirements, increased resilience, the nature of who are the remaining suppliers in the market at the moment. Absolutely, everyone is open for business. You can see the advertising as you walk around London or any city or hear it on the radio as you're driving around. The key thing is that people are competing rationally.
Charles Hall from Peel Hunt, Stuart, can you just talk a little bit about the mobile segment because that showed very strong progress in the first half? What were the key drivers of that? What do you expect in the second half? Maybe just a comment on the quality of the customer base that you're gaining there. Do you see it as any different having a growth in mobile as opposed to other services?
Yeah. Look, the starting point here is that one of the great attributes of a multi-service business model is that you've got multiple different service lines, and therefore, when there are different things happening in different marketplaces, you're able to adjust your proposition accordingly and make different investments in different bits of the proposition to react to everything that's going on there. With mobile, we sort of really saw an opportunity to, as there were sort of some moments of slightly increased competition on the energy side. It's quite competitive on the broadband side as well.
are some well-documented sort of struggles or challenges that some AltNets are having on the broadband side and therefore need to, as part of their sort of raising more money, needing to demonstrate they have more customers on their networks and therefore being sort of, for what I think will be a very time-limited sort of period, being particularly competitive. We saw an opportunity in mobile. We made a big investment in our mobile proposition on our partner event at the beginning of September. We already had a strong mobile proposition, but we sort of gave it an extra kick with a really competitive sort of market-leading entry-level tariff. For our unlimited mobile offering, we provided effectively a discount on you taking additional sort of second, third, or fourth unlimited SIMs to really try and drive sort of multi-SIM sort of take-up.
These customers can be very attractive customers. Mobile is a very easy service to switch. As we increasingly prove out our cross-sell capabilities, the ability to then cross-sell other services into them over time is absolutely a part of how we are thinking about it. Obviously, the price point that they start off on, so they might come in on a particularly attractive sort of price point, there is the opportunity to increase that over time as well.
On the insurance side, obviously, we know why it's been lower over the last year or so. What's the prospects for the second half? Do you think you can start to get momentum, or do we need to wait till next year and new product launches?
Earlier in the year, we brought back all of our insurance products back to full sale. The one difference, perhaps for the period before we paused the sale, is that maybe the prominence of them at the moment is slightly reduced because we made some changes to our proposition, particularly again around mobile, to fill the gap. We have not withdrawn those things that we introduced to fill the gap. Insurance prominence has been slightly less. One of the things that we are working on in the second half is how we can, whilst keeping the mobile prominence, raise the prominence of insurance, whilst also looking at what our next insurance service is to launch. We have obviously got boiler cover and home insurance as our two core services.
My expectation will start to see home insurance sort of starting to push forwards as we go through the second half. Boiler cover, I'm hoping it will push forward. It might be slightly flatter, but we're starting to move into that sort of flat and then rising trajectory as we go through the second half. As we look to FY2027, so next financial year, we'll be looking to launch a new insurance product at some stage and also, as I said, to raise the prominence. We view the opportunity, the scale of the opportunity on insurance is really significant. Once the options include things like motor as an additional service line, as well as potentially travel or pet, they're slightly smaller sort of wallet-sized products, but they all fit neatly into the type of multi-service bundle that we're looking to put together.
I think that FY27, I think, will be when we start to see it really start to sort of push back forwards. The second half is where it sort of really gets itself sort of set up and prepared for that.
Thank you. Tim Ramsgill from Bank of America. Two questions from me, please. The first is just around the cross-sell opportunity. Stuart obviously talked about the kind of approximate 10% cross-sell so far with the initial tranche of customers and then referenced that a low single digit percentage would be what one might aim for. Just interested to know what are your expectations. Does that 20 go higher, or is that a really good outcome and it sort of stays at that level in terms of the future bundles of customers? This is a somewhat sort of messy first half set of numbers just given some of the moving parts right around the industry cost allocations, etc.
Maybe you could just call out for us specifically what the sort of GBP millions impact was of that phasing just so we can sort of better see the underlying trends.
Okay. Cool. I'll take the cross-sell part, and then Nick, if you can take the second bit. Like you said, obviously, this is the first time that we had acquired a set of customers like this and gone through this sort of cross-sell approach into an inorganically acquired book of single service customers. We had some frames of reference about sort of industry rules of thumb about what sort of good cross-sell looks like, but we did not have our own sort of internal sort of real benchmarks for it. I think we've talked before about the economic construct of acquiring these customers is that they'll deliver a return on capital in excess of our WACC even without cross-sell.
Therefore, albeit in the short term, there's various sort of short-term onboarding and migration costs, plus the fact that these customers come on in a very phased way throughout the year. That means that it'll take a bit of time before we start seeing that sort of underlying impact come through. In terms of when that underlying impact is there to come through, once those short-term costs have washed through, obviously, we then have to take a decision about how do we take that to the P&L? Do we reinvest it in accelerating our growth and our competitive position? We'll take that decision as we get there. The cross-sell we view as being upside to that starting point of the return on capital in excess of our WACC.
Going forward, obviously, what we've acquired here is broadband customers, and we're selling sort of, amongst other things, energy, mobile, etc., into these broadband customers. It might be that in future we acquire customers from a different service line that might be we might start with acquiring some mobile customers or some insurance customers or some energy customers. The trends will be a little bit different because there's slightly different dynamics at play. What the key thing is that we've learned is that we have both with the way our multi-service proposition is put together and with the different range of sort of channels that we can use, including using our partners, we believe that we can deliver like an outsized sort of cross-sell return on any inorganic customers that we acquire.
That is what gives us the confidence to go out there and look at sort of other interesting opportunities. The opportunity here was not the acquisition of the couple of hundred thousand customers that we have already acquired from Total. That was very much us trying to prove out a strong hypothesis that we had, and now we are looking about how we can go and actually find ways to sort of bring it to life in a larger scale. Nick.
On the impact of the phasing, I think the way to think about it is that the costs, those industry costs which are impacted by the phasing, are approximately the order of magnitude of about GBP 100 million or so, primarily it is metering costs. Those were previously phased in accordance with the consumption of energy across the halves.
You had in the first half, you've typically got a third energy consumption relative to the second half where you've got two-thirds energy consumption, whereas now these costs are recognized 50/50 from a P&L perspective. The difference between it's the difference between 50% and 33%, which is about 17% times GBP 100 million, that's GBP 17 million. If you adjust the GBP 32.5 million by that GBP 17 million variance, then you'll come to just under GBP 50 million and therefore the equivalent of about 7.5% year on year on a like-for-like basis impact when you adjust for that effect.
At the risk of looking like I'm asking a third question, the other feature of the first half a little bit was the bad debt expense. I completely understand the dynamics of how ultimately that is recouped, but just remind us and help us in terms of the sort of, if you like, the gap between the direct impact of the bad debt expense and the opportunity to recoup it and when that changes. I guess it leads into better gross margins ultimately at a future point in time, but what's the sort of time differential between those two events?
I suppose that's the mechanic that we're talking about there is the price cap, and there's a price cap allowance which is specifically linked to bad debt. When Ofgem observes the evolution of that bad debt picture, it will update that allowance. It's really down to Ofgem in terms of the precise timing associated with that. There will be a lag time which could be as much as six months or something like that, but it's really down to Ofgem in terms of when they choose to update that allowance in practice.
Just two from me, Michael Donnelly from Investec. Thinking about services per customer, which is a metric that we know investors do look at, that's a number that's gone quite a way below three times now where it has been historically. I think that investors understand that the majority of that is the TalkTalk acquisition. I think they can do the arithmetic on that. I think one of the other drivers of it has been that, as you've said in the past, it is sometimes economically optimal for your partner network to sell, for example, two rather than three or more.
Can you just, because this keeps coming up with investors, can you just talk us through once again, perhaps, and with an example about how it is economically advantageous for the business to maybe spend two or three months doing that and then how that feeds through into the ultimate EBITDA per customer, which leads me to my second question, which is I think that aspirational flow chart thing is not in your presentation there. You speak about the cost bits, but you do not have the gap up to the gross margin, the SGNA bit. Is that still where you intend to be in terms of EBITDA per customer in the medium term?
Yeah. Starting with the last bit first, I think it depends how many inorganic acquisition opportunities we come across and how they play through and over what time frame. I think there is, as I mentioned, a simple mathematical impact of acquiring into one-off chunks, single service customers with obviously there being like a time lag of how you cross-sell them that means that there is a dilution or a drag effect. If our ambition is to continue to explore and build out that inorganic acquisition and cross-sell channel, then there is going to be like a rolling sort of dilution impact from that. I think the key thing is to understand, therefore, as we have sort of presented it, that there are these real tangible and meaningful levers that we have to then plug into that customer base and apply to that customer base over time as we go.
In terms of the services per customer dynamic, you're absolutely right. One thing I think it's important to point out is that our period of, I think, highest sort of service per customer rate was when we were growing at our slowest. If you look back into the period, sort of that 2014 to 2021 period, where it was the price war period, where it was very difficult for the business to grow and we were growing at a low single digit %, the only way we were able to grow at the time and make ourselves even attempt to be competitive was by loading all of the value into you taking three or more services from us. That meant that we were able to invest all of the additional margin from the additional services into our pricing when you took everything from us.
It made it quite complex and difficult for our partners to sell, but it meant that it was the only way we could try and get competitive with the irrational pricing at the time. It meant lower rate of growth, but higher services per customer. The world that we're in now is a world where we can be competitive even when we're offering two or even one service per customer. Those price points and those customers can be profitable even when taking two or even just one service from us. We do not need to be sort of constraining our ability to grow by making it super attractive to take three and not very attractive to take two or one. What we're able to do is make it attractive to take one, two, or three at the moment.
That is effectively the strategy that we want at the moment. Obviously, as market dynamics shift, we can adjust that. As I mentioned earlier about how the different dynamics in different individual service lines evolve, we can evolve our competitiveness across different service lines. There have been periods where our energy service growth rate was very high a year or two ago because of the dynamics that were in play there. Our mobile service is very high now because of the dynamics that are in place now. Next time around, it might be insurance that we are talking about as we deliver the next round of enhancements on the insurance offering. I would not be overly looking at either individual service lines in absolute, but understanding that these things can go in waves and it is a feature of the multi-service proposition.
Are there any more questions in the room?
Back for one more.
Just talk a little bit about customer service with these moves to offshoring and more AI. What are you picking up from both partners and customers in terms of how they are seeing the service? Obviously, we know what the Which reports are saying, but what are you seeing from the front line?
What are you seeing? The reason why we've had the confidence to sort of accelerate doing our offshoring in the way we have is because of the positive or the positive metrics and the positive feedback that we can see. The interesting thing I'd say about the offshoring is that we can see that we can get the quality is the same, but it takes slightly longer to get to sort of train up to get to the quality. You've got to sort of build in. You can't go too fast with it. It's the key point.
That's why we're aiming for 30% by year-end rather than 50% or something higher because you have to take the time to train people up who might have the core underlying customer service skills, but they might not have some of the local relatable interaction skills about being able to sort of build a certain rapport because you understand the fact pattern of how someone's living. Things like that take a bit of time, those sort of softer skills to sort of build up. Once you get to sort of get sort of fully trained up, we're seeing essentially the core metrics, sort of first call resolution and sort of internal transfers. All these metrics are basically in line with our onshore teams as well, which is positive.
Are the number of service support people the same going through this process? It's only as you apply the AI that you're going to reduce, or are you reducing as you go?
Yeah. Broadly speaking, the aim is to keep our, in the first instance, keep our headcount flat as we continue to grow. You might recall we did do a redundancy round at the end of the last financial year, but that was not really focused on sort of frontline customer service agents. Obviously, there is a natural sort of natural churn of customer service agents. As that happens, we're aiming as far as possible to not replace them as they go. Of course, what tends to happen is that sort of moments of progress come in sort of steps. It does not come in like a very smooth, neat line. There always will be a little bit of untidiness to it.
Generally speaking, the aim is to not increase our headcount and not replace headcount despite continuing to grow because we are replacing that need and that volume through technology. Of course, at certain moments in time, there might be a step change moment at some stage where suddenly we are able to release something that might displace a larger number, and then we will have to take a different call. Great. Do we have anything on the line? No? Brilliant.
I think in that case, if we are finished with questions, I will just wrap up quickly. I should have had the Q&A slide on for that. Let's sort of flick on to just a little bit. I will finish where I started with the three key takeaways.
Just as a reminder, we have now delivered compounding double-digit growth for four consecutive years underpinned by our unique multi-service subscription style business model, which delivered a structural cost advantage, and our partner route to market, which together, pulling those together, enabled us to sustainably outcompete as we stride on to our 2 million target with expectations of growing between 10% and 15% a year as we go. Second, we are reiterating our full year FY2026 guidance of total customer number increasing by 25%, underlying organic growth in the low double digits, and adjusted PBT in the range of GBP 132 million-GBP 138 million. Third, of course, we have entered into this exciting cross-sell trial partnership with TalkTalk, acquiring these two trimesters of customers and cross-selling additional services using our partners as a unique channel.
The trials are exceeding our expectations, and we now view this very much as a blueprint for acquiring further books of single service customers across our service lines of energy, telecoms, and insurance, into which we can create further value by cross-selling our multi-service offering. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a good day.